How to Define Your MVP’s Core Features: A Step-by-Step Guide for Startups
It’s no secret that many successful app startups launch as a minimum viable product (MVP). By focusing on the core features, you can minimize risks,...
Want to build a product users love? Start by discovering what users need—and then build it.
A successful minimum viable product (MVP) helps founders do exactly that. At its core, an MVP is a tool for gathering feedback and guiding product iteration. It’s a critical step in the agile development process and the foundation for the building, testing, and improvement cycle.
Feedback loops are the mechanism SaaS founders use to accomplish the goals of the MVP. When implemented correctly, they reduce risk, align with user needs, and iterate faster. Given that building an MVP costs anywhere from $10,000 to $400,000+, feedback loops stand to save startups tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in rebuilding costs. They create the structure to support continuous improvement and the agile development process.
Let’s take a detailed look at feedback loops, how to implement them in MVP development, and why they matter for startup success.
What Are Feedback Loops in MVP Development?
In simplest terms, feedback loops are the process that guides software improvement based on user input. The cycle traces several key steps.
- Input: Gather feedback. Sources might include customer interviews, surveys, or user testing.
- Process: Analyze the findings. Patterns and insights emerge to inform changes.
- Output: Implement changes to the product. Insights could lead to changes like adding new features, removing app components, or tweaking the user design.
- Feedback: Close the feedback loop. The resulting product is reentered into the process, as an input.
- Adjustment: Iterate over time. Each cycle through the process builds upon the previous one, improving the product each time.
Although an MVP represents the first functional version of a software product, several feedback loops often take place during the MVP development process. Data from user interviews, usability testing, or market analytics can all inform changes to the MVP.
The iterative process is rarely linear. Feedback loops may ultimately change the trajectory of your product. However, straying from your original MVP feature list or app design isn’t a failure––it’s the foundation of creating a product that truly meets user needs.
Learn more: How to Define Your MVP’s Core Features
Why Feedback Loops Are Essential for MVP Development
Even if you’ve followed all the recommended steps, uncertainty is inherent in early-stage development. Feedback loops reduce risk by validating assumptions and identifying features with the highest impact.
The ultimate goal of an MVP is to test the product in the market, validate demand, and gather feedback to guide future iteration. Feedback loops offer a method to achieve those objectives. Choosing not to adopt feedback loops for MVP development is like flying blind––you might eventually succeed, but the path will be far riskier and less efficient.
Benefits of Feedback Loops
For startups, in particular, feedback loops offer many noteworthy benefits.
- Shorter Time to Market: Feedback loops facilitate faster iterations by gathering and applying user input, supporting quicker market time.
- Lower Development Costs: The feedback-iteration cycle reduces development costs by catching issues early when they’re relatively easy to fix.
- User-Centric Product: Feedback loops help build a product users want to use by discovering and aligning with their needs.
- Improved Retention: Products built with user input foster better engagement and loyalty.
- Continuous Improvement: Adopting feedback loops is congruent with the agile development philosophy since the process fosters continuous improvement.
Building Effective Feedback Loops for Your MVP
Implementing successful feedback loops requires a thoughtful setup. You’ll need to choose technologies and define the processes to support feedback loops in your development process. Follow these three steps to yield the most impact.
Step 1: Gather meaningful feedback.
The first step is collecting high-quality, actionable data. Here are some effective tools and techniques:
- User Analytics Tools: For more insight on user engagement, try a tool like Hotjar which can show you which parts of your interface users interact with most and which areas they ignore. Features like heatmaps and recordings offer a clear picture of exactly how users engage with your product.
- Surveys and Forms: Platforms like Typeform or SurveyMonkey also offer a convenient way to collect feedback.
- User Interviews: Speak directly with users to uncover deeper insights into their needs and pain points.
After you’ve collected feedback, don’t forget to analyze it. Important trends aren’t always obvious. Tools like Google Analytics, for example, make it easier to spot patterns and draw insights from your feedback.
Step 2: Set up a feedback review process.
Feedback is only as valuable as your reviewing and acting process. Ensure a clear process that:
- Involves key stakeholders, like product managers, developers, and marketing teams.
- Prioritizes feedback using structured frameworks (e.g., the Impact/Effort Matrix or RICE scoring).
- Tracks and documents feedback to avoid losing valuable insights.
Step 3: Close the loop.
The final step is to develop a clear process for closing the loop and applying insights. The altered product at the end of the feedback cycle then becomes the input for the next loop. By the end of this step, you should be able to answer several key questions:
- How will changes resulting from feedback be communicated to the development team?
- How will we measure success?
- How will we communicate improvements and iterations back to users?
Communicating the changes to users is almost as important as the changes themselves. You can use tools like social media, email campaigns, and in-app notifications or messages to alert users to new features and improvements. Clear messaging can boost user loyalty and drive adoption.
Analyzing and Acting on Feedback
Often, the feedback-gathering phase yields more possible iterations than a startup can or should tackle at once. Some improvements might have a bigger impact than others. To extract the most value from feedback loops for MVP development, lean on a consistent framework to help prioritize feedback.
Impact/Effort Matrix
The Impact/Effort Matrix is a common tool for managing possible features. To use it, create a simple grid. The x-axis captures effort, ranging from low to high impact. The y-axis measures impact on a scale from low to high. Now, propose changes to the grid according to their relative impact and effort. Arranging feedback in this way can help you visually determine the low-effort, high-impact changes to prioritize.
RICE Scoring
RICE scoring also helps product managers determine which feedback to pursue first. For each piece of feedback or proposed update, list each of the following:
- Reach: How many users will this change attract?
- Impact: How significant are the results we expect this change to bring, ranging from 0.25 (minimal impact) to 3 (massive impact)?
- Confidence: To what extent are our estimates of reach and impact accurate, ranging from 50% (not very confident) to 100% (very confident)?
- Effort: How much time and resources will these changes require? You can estimate the total resources needed as a unit “person-months.”
You can calculate a feature’s RICE score by multiplying Reach by Impact by Confidence and dividing the product by Effort. This offers a more objective point of comparison to maximize impact in the shortest amount of effort.
RICE Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
Feedback Examples: Actionable vs. Unhelpful
When building feedback loops, it’s important to recognize the difference between feedback you can leverage toward improvements and input that won’t support product evolution. These qualities and examples illustrate the difference between unhelpful and actionable feedback.
- Specific: Clearly articulates the issue with precise features or functions
- Unhelpful: “The app feels clunky.”
- Actionable: “The menu button is too small to tap.”
- Measurable: Can be linked to a quantifiable metric, such as load time or time on page
- Unhelpful: “I find some of the features frustrating.”
- Actionable: “The social feed page takes a long time to load.”
- Possible: Achievable, given reasonable design, development, and other constraints.
- Unhelpful: “The app would be better if it showed me the real-time inventory of any local store.”
- Actionable: “I wish the app included a directory of local stores that might sell what I’m looking for.”
- User-Focused: Grounded in what the users want and need.
- Unhelpful: “I think it would look trendier with a more minimal design.”
- Actionable: “A simpler interface would make it easier to navigate.”
Adjust your process if feedback loops consistently yield unhelpful rather than actionable data. You might need to change your feedback-gathering tools to elicit more actionable responses. Alternatively, your review processes could need strengthening. Poor analytics that fail to highlight key trends can conceal actionable insights.
Tips for Managing Feedback
As the saying goes, “The customer is always right.” While that’s true in theory, user feedback must be tempered by business goals. For example, if feedback reveals that users want a social media app, rather than a photo-editing app, that’s helpful information. However, a company might decide that pursuing a social media app doesn’t align with its broader business goals and strengths. In other words, just because user feedback points to an opportunity, pursuing it is not required.
When business goals and user feedback conflict, try these tips to determine which path to take:
- Consider the urgency: Is there a time-sensitive reason to pursue user feedback or can it be delayed to a future round of improvements?
- Reevaluate your business goals: Is there a compelling reason, whether from market shifts, competitive pressure, or some other factor, to reorient your focus?
- Gather more data: Verify that the user feedback you’re receiving is accurate and representative of your target market.
In most cases, your business goals should be broad and nimble enough to accommodate user feedback and product iteration. Rigid businesses that don’t adapt to changing user needs risk becoming irrelevant over time.
Real-World Examples of Feedback Loops
It’s helpful to see feedback loops in action to understand them.
Behind the Knife
For Designli client Behind the Knife, a surgical content and education hub, user feedback nudged the product from a podcast into a visually immersive content library app with gated premium media. With more user testing, the software will continue to evolve with additional features.
Read the full Behind the Knife story here →
Instagram’s MVP Evolution
The Instagram MVP is another great example of how feedback loops shape a digital product. Initially, the app launched as a social check-in app with a photo feature. With user testing, the founders discovered that the photo-sharing feature resonated with users. This insight informed Instagram’s shift to focus on this core function of its MVP. Feedback loops helped Instagram double down on the parts of the app users loved, which enabled it to become the unicorn it is today.
Read more about successful MVPs that became billion-dollar apps →
SaaS startups like Behind the Knife, Instagram, and others require a structured feedback loop. The cyclical pattern of gathering, analyzing, and applying feedback repeats as long as the software exists. There is no “finish line,” but the product should achieve measurable usability, retention, or adoption improvements over time.
Turn Feedback Loops Into Your Competitive Advantage
Feedback loops are critical to improve MVP outcomes. Applying structured feedback loops to your MVP can support a shorter time to market, lower development costs, a user-centric product, and continuous improvement. Embracing feedback loops as part of your MVP development process sets your startup on a path to long-term success by aligning it closely with user demands.
At Designli, user-centered product development is our focus. Reach out for expert guidance on MVP and feedback loop strategies. You can schedule a free consultation to learn more or take the next step toward launching your MVP.
Explore our software development solutions →
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